ABOUT US

Steve Friess is a 2011-12 recipient of the prestigious Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he will be studying the impact of the rapid expansion of Vegas-style gaming on Asia. He's a podcaster, author and Vegas-based freelance journalist who writes regularly for USA Today, The New York Times, Newsweek and many others. His column, "The Strip Sense" appears every Thursday in the Las Vegas Weekly. His books include "Gay Vegas" from Huntington Press and Knopf Mapguides' "Las Vegas."Friess co-hosts the weekly celebrity interview podcast The Strip Podcast "The Strip" with his husband, Miles Smith, the executive producer at KSNV-TV, Channel 3. For four years, Steve also co-hosted The Petcast with Las Vegas Sun education scribe Emily Richmond.

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Saturday, September 10, 2011

OK, so I've got to stop blogging, as I'll explain in the next and final post. But before I go, allow me to empty my files of odd, interesting and weird stuff. Like, for instance, I don't recall if I ever posted this photo anywhere but on Twitter, but if that's not Vegas, I don't know what is:

I think I took this screenshot because I wondered how the Monte Carlo and New York-New York was so unlucky as to be the skyline image of The Strip for, of all things, the web banner for the police:

I think Hanging With Friends might be right about this being a proper noun...

...and I know my iPhone's predictive text is right about Matt Goss:

Gosh, this from our HOA's monthly circular is great news!!!

click to enlarge

I have no idea how this gibberish came to be, but I do think that Caesars Entertanment ought to consider, in rebranding Imperial Palace, calling it Impiety City instead:

click to enlarge

I didn't know airports have slogans, for what it's worth:

Juvenile, I know, but it was a porn convention:

Am I the only one a little thrown by the fact that Flickr used what appears to be this guy's Manhunt pic to promote their service?

Meanwhile, the crack, uh, staff at Caesars Entertainment has a squatting problem because THIS is CaesarsEntertainment.Com:

Yikes, right?

And, finally, Miles wants me to have this enlarged and hung over my desk to deflate my ego whenever necessary:

As you may have read in my acclaimed love-letter essay to Las Vegas and my life there in Las Vegas Weekly, I spent my final days in Nevada packing up a house and office stuffed to the gills with historical and peculiar Vegas stuff. There was a shelf in my office closet with at least a six-foot pile of press materials that proved akin to an archeological survey, newest to oldest layered upon one another like a geological formation.

The stuff I unearthed was Vegas in its most optimistic, boosterish form, such as the above document outlining the expansion plans for the airport. I also found this promo for CityCenter...

I found this magnet from the late, great Dive at the Fashion Show Mall, where I used to take my little brother all the time for fries and to peer through the periscope that offered a Strip view. It was just last month that a listener of the podcast asked me something about this place:

I found these artifacts of the earlier days of our podcast...

We used to send CDs and thank-you notes to all our guests, and once we got this back from the amazing Paula Poundstone:

Here was one of the table centerpieces from the final performance of Siegfried & Roy, a fundraiser for Keep Memory Alive, the foundation that funds the Lou Ruvo Cleveland Clinic for Brain Health in Vegas:

Friday, September 9, 2011

We're having some sort of problem with iTunes and our final -- and several recent special -- episodes of "The Strip" have not been making it into the RSS feed. We're working on fixing that right now, but all of the recent episodes since the iTunes snafu began are listed with links to your right on this blog. I hope to have TheStripPodcast.Com fixed and updated as soon as possible. FYI, We urge you NOT to unsubscribe from our RSS feed because you just never know when a random special might surface there. I still have some good stuff sitting around waiting for my time to edit and post. It could be a while, but it will happen.

Anyhow, here's the show you and we have been simultaneously waiting for and dreading. Enjoy, and listen all the way to the end.

After six years, this is the final regular episode of "The Strip." The show, which debuted on Sept. 1, 2005, was co-hosted by journalists and life partners Miles Smith and Steve Friess. In this emotional episode, we recount the top 10 moments of the show as voted on by listeners, talk about the changes in their lives and play some classic old clips including a never-before-published 6-minute rehearsal in which they discuss what they show should be about and how they'll go about doing it.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Hoo boy... This is really it! We are really, really here, and if you don't believe us, here's a shot of the dogs in their new abode to prove it. It's time to be a fellow and improve ourselves.

We'll record the finale of The Strip from our new Ann Arbor home on Monday evening at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. It'll be a stroll down memory lane in many ways, and we encourage everyone to join us in the live chat room.

Do NOT forget to vote on the Top 10 moments of the series, too. I'll compile the clips we'll use mid-day Monday. And then, after that, dim the marquee lights on Las Vegas Boulevard, folks, because The Strip as you know it will be over.

We concluded our big road trip from Vegas to Ann Arbor, Mich., by waking up amid the Springfield cornfields. Again, there's a Flickr slideshow player at the end of this post or you can watch it here.

As Amy and the dogs relaxed at the hotel on Thursday, I headed to the splendorous Illinois Capitol, where I ended up on a tour given by a fellow who could not have been less interested in giving a tour. When I asked if there was any way to get to the top of the dome, as I had the day before in Missouri, he claimed asbestos and bird poop prevented such things from happening. It didn't sound very credible to me.

He also seemed not to notice that of the three of us on his tour, two wore hearing aids. When he was asked him to repeat himself, he seemed absolutely aggravated by the chore and frequently dumbed down what he had said before. It wasn't that we were stupid, sir, we just didn't hear you because you muttered and didn't wish to be there.

That said, the Springfield capitol is very impressive and extremely historic. But a few things struck me. First, the Abe Lincoln obsession is totally understandable, but there are other U.S. presidents with significant Illinois ties such as Ronald Reagan (born in Dixon, Ill.) and Barack Obama, the former state senator. I had to ask when we were in the Senate chamber where Obama sat. Roughly, it was here:

That was a seat in the back, denoting how junior a member of the body he was. That furniture was not used by him as the prior stuff was replaced a few years ago. His old desk was destroyed. "We didn't know he'd become president," the guide wryly remarked.

And I think that's my takeaway from Illinois, that that building and that whole scene is yet another reminder of just how totally unlikely it was that this guy was ever going to become president, let alone within the decade. He was one of so many legislators, and he served in a building that is a monument to so many incredible historic figures. It doesn't matter what you think of Obama; his path to this office is just extraordinary and almost without precedent in American politics.

Illinois is also known for having several recently convicted governors. I wondered how they'd play that here, but they just put up their portraits nonetheless, as seen by the one here of ex-Gov. George Ryan.

The guide said "the controversial Gov. Rod Blagojevich's portrait will be here someday, too." OK, then.

I'm often asked what's the difference between one and another capitol, and they do blend together. But stopping in on those in Illinois and Indiana on the same day really hit home the differences. Illinois was gorgeous and artistic, a monument to the affairs of the public and our way of life. Indiana? Meh.

The Springfield dome was amazing, Indianapolis' perfunctory:

The legislative chambers in Illinois were august and dramatic...

...and Indiana's was decidedly not.

One state takes good care of even its restrooms. The other doesn't care.

The entryway for Illinois is grand and imposing, Indiana less so.

The artwork and sculpture throughout in Springfield was first-rate, relevant and historic. This is how Indianapolis has left Christopher Columbus' bust desecrated by pigeons:

Gross! Lord only knows what Columbus' relevance to Indiana was to merit him as a major piece of art, but if they do have it they kinda owe it to him not to look like he just participated in a gay gang bang.

I also have never seen an informational marker that ran out of space as this one did:

You may also wonder who the hell else does this hobby. Actually, loads of folks:

And here's the page I signed for, perhaps, the last time as a Las Vegan:

On the drive, Amy and I debated the proper spelling of "capital" v "capitol." So you know, the city is a capital, the building is a capitol. Google Maps didn't know that, either, though:

There's much more, including more terrific puppy pix, in this Flickr slideshow of this segment of the trip, which did conclude in Ann Arbor. I'll get into that in another post. In the meantime, here's the fourth slideshow, which begins in the cornfields of Springfield, takes us to the capitol, then on the Indianapolis before one last car shot of we road warriors. Enjoy!

THE STRIP FINALE

Below are links to the final episodes and last week of special editions of The Strip Podcast. Right-click on any of these to save and hear at your leisure. Otherwise, click on them and they should play. Enjoy, and thanks for the wonderful years.